SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Facebook has cut the price of the Oculus Rift for the second time this year. It debuted at $800, was cut to $600 in March, and is now $400. Is there real trouble in the virtual reality market, or is it just a normal price correction now that early adopters have been served?
It means that the Rift now costs less than the package offered by its cheapest rival, Sony, whose PlayStation VR currently totals $460 including headset and controllers.
Even so, it's not clear that it will be enough to lure people into buying a Rift. A year ago, our own Rachel Metz predicted that the Rift would struggle against Sony's offering because the former requires a powerful (and expensive) gaming computer to run, while the latter needs just a $350 PlayStation 4 game console.
Jason Rubin, vice president for content at Oculus, tells Reuters that the reduction isn't a sign of weak product sales, but rather a decision to give the headset more mass market appeal now that more games are available. Don't believe it: this is the latest in a string of bad news for the firm, which has also shut down its nascent film studio, shuttered in-store demo stations of its hardware, and stumped up $250 million as part of a painful intellectual property lawsuit in the last six months.
Here's a February story about the Oculus demo stations at Best Buy stores being shut down.
Previously: Facebook/Oculus Ordered to pay $500 Million to ZeniMax
Google Partnering With HTC and Lenovo for Standalone VR Headsets
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:01PM (6 children)
AFAIK, stealth games have implemented good audio, or at least placed a much greater emphasis on it than other genres. And you can get realistic sounding audio by using binaural recording [wikipedia.org]. Maybe that method doesn't even need fancy software techniques?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:35PM (5 children)
Binaural recording sounds more like a remote set of ears.
I'm talking real time refraction by taking a pre-recorded mono sample and using the game's 3D geometry, create a new sample based on the multiple paths of reflection. So you have a layered cake of the same sample but with slight delays and differentiation in the left-right mix which all account for the shape of the human ear as well. Now you have a sound that can be "located" in 3D space. That is well beyond the simple left/right/front/rear we have now.
Picture yourself in an older home, the kind where the floors creek, with a second story. Your in a 1st floor room and someone walk above you on the 2nd floor. I bet you that IRL, you can tell their location and heading from that sound. Now picture that in a game: You hear the footsteps of an enemy above you walking across the floor. Now you can shoot through the floor or predict where he's going. Thats a real game changer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 11 2017, @07:00PM (4 children)
So EAX [wikipedia.org], TrueAudio [wikipedia.org] et al. are not sufficient? Bummer.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:31AM (3 children)
EAX: Dead.
The AMD TrueAudio appears to be AMD only. And I have not heard of it until now, must have been under a rock or something. I'll have to see if I can demo it on my AMD Linux box. Otherwise, my windows gaming rig is Intel/Nvidia.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:52PM (2 children)
Wasn't EAX's death due to some change Microsoft made to their driver model? OpenAL was supposed to make it work (or even take over from it), but I don't think there's much interest OpenAL.
The only game I ever remember using EAX well was Thief: Deadly Shadows (Thief 3); it added so much to the game, plus it made the Cradle level even more disconcerting. I tried running the Steam version with OpenAL but it just crashed to desktop, sadly.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 13 2017, @03:18PM (1 child)
Yes. From the EAX wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
And further down we find:
Look like AMD is trying to bring back the idea but an AMD only option is a dead end in my opinion. Either we start using the GPU or we make use of all those cores we have coming about.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Friday July 14 2017, @09:05AM
Thank you for finding that Wikipedia link that I was too lazy to dig out. :)
I agree that anything that can't be freely implemented is just a postponed dead end. Using the CPU or GPU makes sense as the market for third-party sound cards for gaming is small and getting smaller; onboard sound is improving and most people seem happy with it, plus you have external sound cards that don't require any fiddling around inside the case. I wonder if AMD wanting their own implementation is tied to the upcoming APUs based on their Zen architecture?